Thing is, all three of those were forcibly injected into politics in the 1950s, riding a wave of fear of The Commies and The Bomb. The Founding Fathers had nothing to do with them, and the majority would likely be appalled at today’s America.

The Founding Fathers were great men of their time. Not perfect — some were slave-owners, and none expressed any belief in the equality of women, or even of the people in general (landowners were the only ones qualified to vote, to them) — but they got a lot right too. One of the things they got right was insisting on the separation of Church and State, and we really ought to pay attention to the life-lessons they based that on… before we’re forced to re-live them.

[All of these] will have to be let in, or the whole program must collapse under howling derision and accusations of hypocrisy.

Not that the people behind ID have any trouble with their own hypocrisy.

(And yes, the unscientific alternatives include my personal favorite, the “simulation” hypothesis. I support Darwinian evolution as the only viable scientific theory for how life originally arose, but I also think that this reality isn’t the original. It can’t be proven, and thus is not scientific, but I suspect the reason for this is deliberate. As such, that argument doesn’t dissuade me from it.)

I don’t know the context of that quote, but I’m very concerned about the science deniers in the US. It seems that, despite mandatory science classes in high school, most people still don’t understand science. Conservatives seem to think that science is like religion: convince enough people of something and science will have to follow. It doesn’t work like that… if all the evidence goes against your Intelligent Design theory (code-words for creationism), then your theory is thrown out. Regardless of what you might want to be true, or how nice it sounds, or how many people might agree with you.

If you claim that humans did not evolve from other creatures, as a pointed for-instance, then you’re denying the very basis of the medical knowledge that allows people — including you! — to live more than thirty years today. It’s only due to the belief that we did, and thus that we’re very biologically similar to other creatures, that we can progress on the assumption that things that help other creatures should also help us. Would you rather we had to assume the opposite, that other creatures are entirely unrelated to us, and test everything out on people from the very beginning? The death rate would be appalling. No one would stand for that, so medical science would never be able to develop anything. Which, by the way, was the state of things when the world was ruled by religion — it was actually illegal to dissect a human corpse, so there was no way would-be doctors could legally learn about the human body.

Worse, if a large enough minority of people deny science (which is where we seem to be headed right now), then science can’t continue and will actually be pushed back. Do you really want to turn the clock back to medieval lifespans? Vocal science deniers do, though some might not realize that that would be a consequence. Not that it would matter to them, they preach one thing and do the opposite, and see no problem with it so long as they’re not caught.

Science is about being able to explain the physical world so that we can predict things about it. It has sharply-defined limits — it can only address the physical world, and can’t be applied to everything even there. But for those things that it can be applied to, you’d have to be a flaming idiot to deny its evidence.

Unfortunately the world — and especially the US — is full of flaming idiots, and they’ve been given far too much authority in recent decades.

If the First Amendment were ever put on trial, these people — who I won’t explicitly name because it would give them the undeserved recognition they’re trying for — would be the prosecution’s Exhibit A. Fortunately, they were irrelevant before they even existed, and history shows that they’ll fade to oblivion like every other hate group. Twenty years from now, they’ll only be a footnote in advanced history students’ term papers.

However, as I suggested recently to a voluble evolution denier, they’re welcome to try. The discipline of science is self-correcting, and will shrug off anything that contradicts the evidence, as it has throughout history. You never know, one of these guys might come up with something useful to science despite his beliefs.

[...] To put this in context: Out of more than 150,000 murders in the United States since 9/11 — currently more than 14,000 each year — Islamist terrorists accounted for fewer than three dozen deaths by the end of 2010. Part of the credit for this is surely due to the law-enforcement officers and community members who have worked to uncover plots before they could be carried out. But fewer than 200 Muslim Americans have been involved in violent plots since 9/11, most of them overseas, so credit for the low level of violence must be due primarily to the millions of Muslims who have refrained from answering the call to terrorism.

Why aren’t there more terrorists? I’m sure it’s a combination of things. The article lists five possibilities, but doesn’t mention the (to me) most obvious one: evolution. A successful terrorist must have sufficient intelligence to be competent at it, sufficient gullibility not to see through the cynical manipulations of terrorist leaders, and very violent tendencies, among other things. The combination is extremely rare, and every time a suicide bomber attacks (which, by definition, each can only do once), he removes himself from contributing his genes to the next generation.

Terrorists are an endangered species. They probably won’t become extinct any time soon, but they’re well on the way to it.

(Via Schneier on Security)

The reason it shocked me is that I couldn’t believe that someone who identified himself as an evangelical Christian would ever accept evidence that his beliefs were mistaken, or publicly admit to it if he did. In my experience, that just does not happen. I had to dig up more information on it.

It looks like the original report was from NPR, but I found even more interesting information elsewhere. At the bottom of this article (on what appears to be a religious-oriented site):

Back in 2006, National Geographic provided some interesting information on the American public’s take on evolution. The U.S., when compared to other Western nations, is essentially much less inclined to accept evolution as fact:

In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.

More recent (2010) Gallup data shows 40 percent of the nation embracing the notion that God created man in his current form, with only 16 percent claiming that God played no part in the process of creation. While the scientific and Christian communities continue to grapple with internal disagreement, it seems the creationists are thus far winning the PR war.

The data presented there is factually accurate, but misleading, and I think it was deliberate. The 2010 poll actually had three options:

• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process. (16%)
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process. (38%)
• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. (40%, “down from 47% in 1993 and 1999″)

So 54% of people are actually professing a belief in evolution in 2010. The 2006 data seems to have a similar bias, but in a quick search I couldn’t find the hard numbers on it.

That gives me faith in humanity: if even in the US people are getting more inclined to look beyond the doctrines handed down from religious leaders — and doing so at a rate I find frankly astonishing — then we may actually be able to survive the current political crapstorm between intelligence and obstinate idiocy.

Apparently Mr. Camping already has a backup date: when he and his believers don’t vanish today, then he says it’ll be October 21st instead. Now that’s faith. I predict that he’ll just keep extending it until he’s dead, at which point no one will care how many times he was wrong anymore, including him. Or, like several before him, he’ll declare that due to the pleas of he and his flock, God has decided to put it off ’til later. In case you hadn’t thought of that already, Mr. Camping, you’re welcome.

But just in case he’s right, and the end of the world happens to include zombies, the Center for Disease Control has issued an emergency preparedness statement. Better get out there and start packing, non-believers.

But while it’s a good idea, there’s no real need to rush. Mr. Camping’s calculations are wrong. Everyone who really knows what’s going on knows that the End Times won’t start until Sarah Palin is elected President, and that won’t be until December 17th of 2012 when the electoral college officially votes her in. The Mayans were only off by a few days.